Aborted North - Week 31 (December 16 - December 22)

Aborted North

Week 31

Well, Monday to Friday, what is there to say?

Not a whole lot on my front. Sophie had an interesting time I think though. It was her first real chance to bum around the city and get a feel for everything. She spent most of the week investigating, wandering around Koganei park and getting a feeling for being back in Japan. I went out jogging one night of the week and Sophie came along and wandered around the park while I jogged my usual circuitous route. Sophie came back the next day and took a bunch of pictures with her film SLR which I’m really looking forward to seeing when I get back to Canada...whenever that is.

Tuesday night I also had a class canceled, which allowed me to walk back to my apartment and get Sophie to walk around town a bit. We went to a family restaurant called Jonathan’s and enjoyed both Japanese and American food. Good little combination.

After that a bit of shopping and then home for the night.

The remainder of the week passed in much the same fashion until Saturday night, when Sophie had the opportunity to meet my current coworker, Kayoko, and my former coworker Sean, in that most excellent of places, a yakiniku restaurant. We went to Gyu-Shige in Tachikawa, enjoyed a lot of meat, some good rice and then, due to the relatively early end times of the trains, quickly caught a train back to Koganei. We would eat yakiniku later on in the trip as well.

Sunday morning was the beginning of the “holidays” for me. Although I had to work from the the 24th to the 27th, the 23rd was a national holiday on account of it being the Emperors’s birthday.

Excellent.

So we went to Nikko, a small resort town up in the mountains north of Tokyo. It also contains a World Heritage site!

Who was we? Well, Sophie and myself of course, but also the esteemed Winny of Fujiyoshida fame.

We met Winny in Shinjuku and proceeded from there to the Shinkansen station in Tokyo. After the brief Shinkansen ride a transfer onto a local line at Utsonomiya brought us most of the rest of the way there. Bit of a trip in all, a couple hours. It was pretty scenic at least, and I started to get excited when I saw the size of the mountains out towards the edge of the city. I had this relatively ambitious plan to abandon the two girls and head off into the peaks for 2 of the three days we were there. It was nice to finally see some snow up on those mountains too.

The arrival in Nikko was...disappointing to say the least. We ran into a rather odd woman from the Midwest who assumed we were all Americans on the train. We had sort of an awkward conversation with her...which was also kind of strange because she began speaking and then seemed not particularly interested in what we had to say.

It was also a bit remarkable because that was the first time in several months that a foreigner I did not know struck up a spontaneous conversation.

Anyways, upon our arrival at the station I mentioned that I had a couple of books on hiking in the area and I offered to photocopy her a few pages that focused on the Nikko area. I assumed she would come with us to a convenience store to get the copies done...She assumed that I meant I would print it out and then drop it by the front desk of her hotel, which is an extremely haughty assumption on her behalf.

In the words of my generation...fuck that.

The lady kind of disappeared at the station and none to soon in my estimation. We took off down the main road of Nikko towards our hotel which was maybe a 4 kilometre walk away. Ouch.

Nikko is an initially uninspiring town. I forgot that my guide book warned me about this. The main street is lined by some pretty dreary, run down at times, tourist shops. On the plus side, once we passed out of the area surrounding the station, Nikko suddenly became picturesque. We crossed over the river that runs through the town and were awarded with our first impressive touristy sight, the Shin-kyo bridge.

Apparently the bridge was made when a Buddhist priest on a pilgrimage came to the river and was unable to find a way to cross. Two snakes appeared and extended themselves across the river before suddenly vanishing after the priest had passed. The bridge standing there now is not the original, as it has been rebuilt numerous times over the last 400 years.

We continued on the long, long walk to our hotel . Ultimately we found it and it was quite beautiful, Japanese style, and right next to the river. Really amazing. We dropped our bags and headed out for a short walk along the river that looped all the way back through the city. The river is amazing, I’ve never seen water that clear or that blue before. We strolled along taking photos and admiring the scenery before looking for a restaurant. This section of the river actually called the Ganman-ga-fuchi abyss...which is way over dramatic as the photos attest.

I was intent on finding an authentic Japanese place for dinner that night because Sophie was still fresh in Japan and hadn't had much in the way of real Japanese food yet. This proved a harder task than you might think.

Now, I’m not sure if it was the wicked economic recession or the timing of our visit or whatever, but most of the restaurants in the city were closed. We ended up halfway back to the station at a little Korean place that was actually quite awesome. The proprietors were incredibly friendly. We struck up a long conversation with the husband portion of the husband/wife combination that owned the store. He was very genki and quite funny. He was nice enough to write his name in proper calligraphy for Sophie. Very cool.

We headed back home and watched some TV before heading to bed relatively early.

It should be noted at this point that we were sleeping on futons and that this was one of the first times Sophie had ever used this particular kind of bed. She did, what we’ve come to term, “The Rotisserie” all night, meaning she tossed and turned in a rolling motion all night. She even said that she rotisseried into Winny on more than one occasion. Winny is apparently a pretty heavy sleeper because she didn’t even notice it. Crazy.

Next morning we were a bit slow to start but ended up on the bus and en route to Chuzenji-ko after spending about a half hour wandering around an old graveyard that contained the graves of some old Samurai lords. It's an interesting trip up a dozen or more switch backs for terminating at Chuzenji-ko.

Chuzenji-ko is a mountain lake a little less than 1300m above sea level. The lake itself was created by the eruption of Nantai-san a few thousand years ago which plugged the valley allowing the lake to form itself. The way this lava dam was created left the lake with a truly picturesque natural wonder: Kegon falls. A thin finger of water dropping 67m down into a gully that feeds into the river going through Nikko.

We spent some time snapping photos of Kegon before heading out. It had been my intention upon my arrival to climb both Nantai-san and Oku-shirane-san over the course of this weekend.

Unfortunately, the proprietor of the restaurant the night before had informed me that there was already too much snow for the summits of either of the mountains to be reached. I’ll be back in spring to give it another shot, as anyone on my Facebook knows from my series of photos from Senjogahara...

Which is where we were headed. I was going to drag Winny and Sophie along on this hike, which is considered to be rather short (2 1/2 hours). We had a few difficulties in the beginning though. For one, the bus that would have taken us along the 2 hour walk to the trailhead was not running frequently at all, so we just ended up walking there. About halfway along Winny decided she’d had enough (I don’t blame her, it was damn cold) and she caught a bus up to the end of the trail in Yumoto, above Senjogahara.

Sophie and I made the long trek. After basically walking the entire north shore of Chuzenji-ko, and running into the delightful woman from the train from earlier on, we hit the trail head at Ryuzu falls late in the day and started the hike proper.

Senjogahara is a really beautiful hike. The timing of the hike in early winter meant that there was some snow on the ground in places but not more than a few inches deep in any one place. We wandered alongside the river, snapping shots of the falls before eventually hitting the boardwalk over the swamp in Senjogahara.

Things started to get interesting at this point.

The boardwalk resisted the snow a lot better than the ground did...unfortunately it didn’t resist it 100%, which meant that there was a nice thin veneer of ice over much of the boardwalk. This resulted in a really, really slippery ride at times for Sophie and I.

Things were going pretty well and we were making great time. To my chagrin though, the lack of a bus ride from Kegon falls to the trail head meant that it started to get dark earlier than I would have liked. About an hour or so from the end of the trail Sophie and I had to stop and crack out the headlamp and flashlight.

Around about this time I got a text from Winny telling me that she’d got bored of waiting and decided to head home. Fair enough!

Before long Sophie and I hit the second set of waterfalls, the ones that mark the beginning of the last short ascent up to Yomoko and the end of the hike. Up we went...

A couple minutes later we were at the top. We started off on the path that ran to the left of the lake. At this point, the sun had completely set and it was pitch dark without headlamps.
And here’s where it got dangerous.

The path was a bit sloped down towards the lake on the right, which was below a 10 to 15 foot drop. Problem was, the path was heavily, heavily iced over in places. Enough so that we couldn’t walk in a straight line without sliding towards the edge and a short fall into freezing cold water. Add to this the wind picking up and light snow flurries starting to come down which did a great job of reducing vision and making the ice more slippery than it already was.

Fucking fantastic.

So Sophie and I struggled along in these conditions for about 30 mins, at times grabbing each other as we were in the process of slipping towards the edge.

We made it through though, safe and sound and very happy to hop on the bus and warm up on the way back down the mountain switchbacks to Nikko, where we met a tired but relaxed Winny. Which also meant the hotel room was toasty warm! Things for getting everything set Winny!

Sophie and I had bought some food at the convenience store on the way home, so dinner was cheap, but good. I had some kind of ramen that advertised itself as “manly”. I didn’t notice any difference.

So we watched a bunch of Christmas specials and went to bed. As the heater creaked away in the corner a light snow began to fall outside the window...


The end of Nikko with next post dear readers!

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Pictures: 1. Frozen puddle beside the river in Nikko, 2. Alongside the ganman-ga-fuchi abyss, 3. The ganman-ga-fuchi abyss, 4. Nantai-san at sunset, 5. Sophie enjoying the stepping stones right before the rapids in ganman-ga-fuchi, 6. Little pool beside Ganman-ga-fuchi, 7. A massive flock of hawks or something we saw at sunset, 8. Sophie and Winny strolling home after dinner on the first night, 9. Samurai tombs in Nikko, 8. On the bus heading up towards Chuzenji-ko, 9. Kegon Falls, 10. Chuzenji-ko, 11. Ryuzu Falls (beginning of the hike), 12. The path, 13. The river winding out of senjogahara, 14. Senjogahara, 15. Miller's Crossing shot, 16. Oku-shirane range in the far backgrounds, 17. This tree is famous, the only one in the middle of the wetlands, 18. Nantai-san across Senjogahara (mountain on the right), 19. Beginnings of sunset, 20. Sunset, 21. Final light.